Pet breeding difficulty

[Highroller]

First the good things. I love that the shard allows you to solo breed limited numbers of pets and the custom pets.

Now the difficulties.

First and most painful the fail rate is out of control. I routinely have fail rates of 90% or greater on maxed pets. Sometimes the fail rate on maxed pets for the day is 100%. PLEASE back down on the fail rate setting at least SOME. Its already so bad I have had to raise the price of my pets on my vendor because I literally couldn't breed them fast enough to replace what was selling.

Another thing is sterile pets. Now the sterile rate is supposed to be 5%. So a 1 out of 20 chance which means it SHOULD be a 1 out of 400 chance to get both pets from a cross sterile. In recent history on breeding cu sidhes that I had invested 200 ointments in one pair of babies had one sterile and one had one breeding. I managed to recover from that and now a pair had BOTH babies sterile. I would like to see the sterile chance go away altogether but assume that's not going to happen. How about a deed you can buy for a reasonable rate that can only be applied to a sterile pet at lvl 1. ie a true sterile not a bred out pet. Limit of 1 per pet. I have also seen such low breeding rates that a sterile pet forced me to drop back 3 generations. ie a LOT of pets with only 1 breed.

This is also the only shard I have seen that limits how many times a pet can breed in the first place. I think the limited breeds IS a good idea but in combination with the horrible fail rate and the way the sterile pets have been working for me I am at the point of looking for another shard where I CAN breed pets. Endless fails and the few I do manage to cross having a lot of sterile pets has me very disenchanted.

If the intent is to make people stop breeding altogether just say so and I can move on. If not then I feel you need to lighten up on the difficulty a bit. Its so bad I am getting fails on back breeding gen 9's to gen 1's. I mean I now have 5 Animal Tamer characters and the 5 of them can't get as many successful pet crosses as my one character used to.

[everwolf]

Are you solo breeding? Th e failure rate is much worse than when you breed with someone else. Also back breeding has much worse success rate than say breeding to 1st gens or 2 3rd gens.

[Highroller]

Are you solo breeding? Th e failure rate is much worse than when you breed with someone else. Also back breeding has much worse success rate than say breeding to 1st gens or 2 3rd gens.

Actually my success rate is exactly the same solo breeding or with a 2nd person. Yes back breeding is harder than 2 early gens but its supposed to be easier than breeding 2 maxed out pets.

[Highroller]

Well you know that 1 in 400 chance (in theory) of getting both of a pair of pets come out sterile, I just had it happen AGAIN on a pair of juiced up cu's. Sorry, the bad luck theory is looking weaker and weaker. Same morning I got 2 pairs to succeed crossing out of 10 and 1 of the pairs that didn't fail was a back breed. Guess I gotta look for that other shard after all.

[+Colibri]

Been meaning to reply earlier, to shed some light on the subject...

The difficulty isn't to stop breeding, but it is meant to make it hard when you get to the high end pets. Pets are already too dominant on the shard, actually there's a plan on making melee more interesting but I haven't gotten around to coding that system yet.

With the difficulty of breeding, the thing is, breeding success chance is determined from the stats of the parents. If the parents are already almost maxed, you will have a fairly low chance of succeeding. With the breeding script directly from RunUO, the problem is that in about a month, everyone starts running around with completely maxed pets, and that's not really balanced.

As for the problem with sterility, I can only attribute that to big amounts of bad luck. I have checked the code, basically it generates a RandomDouble (a random number between 0.0 and 1.0) and if this number is lower than 0.05, then the number of times this offspring can breed, is 0. It can also come out with 1,2,3 or 4 breeds (where 4 is also a slim chance). Either the random number generator generates 0.05 more than just 5% of the time, or you are just the unlucky player who always gets that number. I have looked into this 2 times now, and I don't think that the generator is faulty (a whole bunch of things works on the same way, so we would see really strange stuff going on if the random generator was broken).

It's the same with crafting the resource keys. With the I think 30% chance of success, some people can try to craft it 10 times and they will only succeed once, while some people might craft 3 of them and not fail a single one. There was a person that crafted these and almost never failed, so he/she made lots of money off them When i tried, i was the one who crafted it 10 times and only succeeded once

I wish i could provide more insight but in theory.

BTW, the sterility chance is the same, no matter whether the pet is almost maxed, or freshly tamed.
Also about the single breeding myth, now this might be true in practice, but the code doesn't say anything about single breeding to have a different chance of success.